“I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery, or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it; but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt. We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“When I’m stressed, it feels like my brain has turned to porridge and it’s coming out of my ears. The drugs for my bipolar never really stopped that. Cold water does.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“This isn’t about getting you fixed. This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Sun is bright sky is clear, ocean calling you to swimm enjoy don't forget winter will come where you'll respect water and being friends of blankets, life is like that enjoy the moment remember the feature.”
“Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes---lays on flat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey---and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans.
To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it's happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will one day be past history. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. But one things is certain: we will simply have new things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again.
In the meantime, we can deal only with what's in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“I don’t power on through, I don’t put up a facade, and I don’t keep it in. I take a couple of days off and look after myself until I’m well again. I go to the sea, make sure I’m getting some good nutrition, cancel all my appointments, and rest until I’m better. I know what to do.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere else is where ghosts live concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world, somewhere else exists at a delay so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already on the brink of somewhere else anyway.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“I was supposed to worry about his future qualifications more than his ability to be content. I was not willing to do that. I didn’t feel that the two should be in conflict achieving your potential and not being completely miserable.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“But if happiness is a skill than sadness is too. Pephaps through all those years at school or perhaps through other terrors we are taught to ignore it, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. as adults we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times